An Afghan journalist detained for 11 months at the main US military base at Bagram has alleged that his captors kicked him, forced him to stand barefoot in the snow and didn’t allow him to sleep for days.
Jawed Ahmad, who was working for CTV, a Canadian television network, was handed over to Afghan authorities on Sunday, said Captain Christian Patterson, a spokesman for the US-led coalition.
The US designated him an “enemy combatant” earlier this year and had accused him of having contact with Taliban leaders, including possessing their phone numbers and video footage of them, according to a complaint filed by Ahmad’s lawyers earlier this year in US District Court in the District of Columbia.
PHOTO: AP
Ahmad said on Monday that while in prison, US interrogators accused him of being a Taliban fighter, supplying weapons to the militants and of being an intelligence agent for Pakistan.
“What they blamed me for was not true. If it was true they would not have released me,” Ahmad said at a hotel in Kabul on Monday.
Patterson said Ahmad was released because he was no longer considered a threat.
The 21-year-old was detained on Oct. 26 last year at a NATO base near the southern city of Kandahar.
Ahmad said a US military public affairs officer called him to come to the base, and he was taken into custody in the US Special Forces compound.
During his Kandahar detention, Ahmad alleges he was kicked, that his head was slammed into a table and that he wasn’t allowed to sleep for nine days.
US officials threatened to send him to Guantanamo for years, he said. His head was shaved, he was made to wear an orange jumpsuit and flown to the main US base at Bagram.
He said soldiers there forced him to stand for six hours on the snowy runway with no shoes. He said he passed out twice and was forced to stand back up.
Captain Kaymberley Juradl, a spokeswoman for the US-led coalition, said Ahmad had access to routine medical treatment while at Bagram, met with the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that Ahmad didn’t make any reports to officials that he was abused.
“We take those kind of allegations seriously and our people are trained to respect everybody, and we don’t abuse people like that,” she said.
Ahmad worked as a translator for US Special Forces for two-and-a-half years, starting in 2002. He quit after the second time he was wounded in a Taliban attack, he said.
He readily admits that he had contact with Taliban fighters.
“As a journalist you have the right to talk to any organization.
You are the eyes of the world,” he said. “Yes, I talked to the Taliban like any other reporter. I traveled with them. I did stories with them. They are not my uncles or brothers, they are the Taliban.”
“I talked to them just like I talked to NATO. If you know only one party, you are useless,” he said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
ECONOMIC DISTORTION? The US commerce secretary’s remarks echoed Elon Musk’s arguments that spending by the government does not create value for the economy US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday said that government spending could be separated from GDP reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn. “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.” Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the US economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because
RSS